László Bácsi has put together a Chrome or Greasemonkey script called Ruby5_favorites which allow you to "favorite" stories on the Ruby5 website. You can use it as a way to remember stories which you may later want to look back to. If you have it installed, then coming back to the site will give you a quick list of everything you've favorited.

On Friday of last week, the Ruby core team made several announcements, most notably we've been given an updated Ruby 1.9.3 release schedule and a discussion has been started around the Ruby 1.8.7 end of life schedule.

Maybe you've got an application where users can set their own preferences for different activities. Maybe, you want a simple way to store, recall, and investigate those preferences per user. Well, simple_eav by Tim Linquist does just that. It gives you a single, serialized column of preferences per model, helper methods for using them, and a quick way to manipulate them.

Last week, Avdi Grimm wrote up yet another great article, entitled "Demeter: It's not just a good idea. It's the law." In it, he points out that using the "try" method should be considered a code smell and that you should follow the Law of Demeter and refactor your code.

How about in your next application, instead of writing up those reports in Ruby, you just delegate it to Google Spreadsheets, instead? The firmafon team recently released a gem called "to_google_spreadsheet." It takes an enumerable object and pumps the data over to auto-populate a Google Spreadsheet so that managers and execs and manipulate them however they please.

It's not often a necessity, but if you find yourself needing to download a single file out of a zip archive which is stored remotely (yeah, I know, but wait...), then Pinch by Peter Hellberg and Edward Patel is just what you need. It exploits HTTP 1.1's range requests to extract just the single file that you need directly out of the ZIP archive without transferring the entire thing across the network. Pretty neat.

Probably strftime is the single most looked-up method in Ruby. There have been attempts to make it easier to build out the format string, but it's still a pain. So, Jeremy Weiskotten released Stamp, which goes the other direction. You give Stamp the format of the string you'd like to receive, and it gives you the formatted time, automagically.